Haiti Quake Survivors Need Food, Medicine
Friday, January 29, 2010

A volunteer team helps provide food and medical care to survivors in Haiti.

Survivors of the Haiti earthquake are in desperate need of food and medicine. Due to the massive scope of the destruction, including loss of infrastructure and limited amount of shelter, few volunteers have been able to enter Haiti at this time. However, members of a United Methodist volunteer medical team consisting of doctors, nurses, and a few others arrived in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, the Saturday following the 7.0 earthquake. While they found very little destruction there, the members did encounter survivors from Port-au-Prince and other devastated areas seeking medical help for themselves and family members. Lee Warren, Virginia director of Stop Hunger Now, said one child she saw was one of only five children who had survived in a large Port-au-Prince school.

One of the first things the volunteer team realized upon arriving in Haiti was that the hospital, patients and staff alike, had no food. Several members immediately grabbed sandwiches and drinks and headed to the hospital. After distributing what they had, they worked at the Tovar medical clinic, part of The Haiti Mission, a United Methodist-supported project. According to Warren, the staff mainly helped in treating the basic health needs of the community. Aside from treating earthquake-related wounds, the team worked with people whose families had been torn apart. Warren helped one teenage girl learn how to care for a five-month-old boy whose mother, a relative of the girl, had been killed in the quake.

The team also saw rampant evidence of malnutrition in people of all ages. Children in the clinics, swollen from malnutrition, prompted Warren to distribute the 36 prepackaged Stop Hunger Now meals she had stuffed in her suitcase before departing. More of these meals arrived or were en route to Haiti this week, in addition to thousands of cans of precooked chicken and roast beef, bottles of water, and medical aid. Stop Hunger Now and several UM churches are planning more meal packaging events and aim to send shipments of meals to Haitian clinics and orphanages in the coming months.

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